


The Good, the Bad, and the Chaotic Neutral

by airbeartrash



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Western, Angst, Aristocracy, Attempted Murder, Badass Ladies, Bandits & Outlaws, Bayou, Boys In Love, Canon Gay Character, Character Death, Class Differences, Country & Western, Cussing, Descent into Madness, Gay Male Character, M/M, Madness, Murder, Necromancy, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Rebellion, Resistance, Resurrection, Revenge, Skeletons, Slums, The Author Regrets Nothing, Tragedy, Undead, Western, Whiskey - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-04
Updated: 2017-10-04
Packaged: 2019-01-08 19:52:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12260997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airbeartrash/pseuds/airbeartrash
Summary: A story of rebellion, resistance, hope...and what happens when it all goes to shit.A.K.A., a fun way to write my D&D character's back story.





	The Good, the Bad, and the Chaotic Neutral

It was common knowledge among the working class that most non-goblin servants of the aristocratic Weedpatch city center began their sorry lives as bastard infants from the Shou brothels. Exchanged for a handful of coin, most of the children were fated to remain in the care of the perhaps-related older servants they worked tirelessly alongside, sweeping walkways, picking fruit, emptying chamber pots, and other such duties the nobility saw as beneath them. 

But Meiryo Coltrane never believed in destiny.

At the age of seven, the young girl managed to slip away in the night, taking one of her many half-siblings, Calibri, along with her. Over the next several years, the two learned to make ends meet by hustling passersby in the sprawling working class slums that separated the city center from the aristocracy-owned and peasant-run farmlands of Weedpatch. The siblings worked as a tight unit – Mei flashing a shy smile to distract the eyes of lecherous old men while Cal dipped hands into purses and pockets; Cal playing look out while Mei raided unattended wagons. 

By the time they were teenagers, Mei and Cal had amassed a small fortune, expanding their repertoire from petty theft and lock-picking to poisons, drug trafficking, and arms dealing. Business was good, heightened by the increasingly poor morale and unrest of the working class. It was common to hear word of aristocracy-hired orc mercenaries beating townsfolk to death for minor infractions, and increasingly likely that resistors would end up with a bullet in their head or a noose around their neck in the town square as a warning to others with fleeting thoughts of being heroes.

The working class were afraid and angry, but unorganized.

It was not long after he turned fifteen that Cal met Corbel Dallas, a black young man a year older than him who hailed from the farmlands, where he raised livestock on a small plot of land with his twin sister. Corbel was clearly out of place in the city center slums, but said he’d made the journey because he’d heard word of the Coltrane siblings, and thought they’d be able to help him. 

Cal was immediately put at ease by Corbel’s confidence and relaxed demeanor. Over drinks at the local saloon, the young man eventually disclosed that he was looking for someone trustworthy that could secure weapons and ammunition off the books, though he wouldn’t say anything more than that. Cal agreed to help him out, accepting the wool blankets, tobacco, and a few chickens he offered as payment. Though the transaction had been arranged, the two continued to talk throughout the next several hours, as if they’d known each other for years. When he noticed the sun setting through the window outside, Corbel thanked Cal and picked up the bar tab, shaking his hand firmly before untying his horse to head back home, with a promise to return the next day to finish the story he'd begun telling.

Cal felt an odd sensation swelling in his chest as he watched the newcomer and his horse disappear over the horizon in the fading light. Thinking about the boy's smile, dark eyes, and the way he'd been drawn into every word that was spoken, he realized suddenly that he wanted to be around this person more than anyone he'd ever wanted to be around before. 

It took nearly six months of trivial purchases in the slums, trips out to the farmlands, and long conversations over whiskey, before Cal drunkenly made a pass at Corbel while walking home from the saloon one night without realizing what he was doing. He quickly apologized, but was thrown off guard when Corbel pulled him into an alley off the main road and reciprocated. 

The two were nearly inseparable from that point on.

As the two grew closer, Cal learned that while reading and writing were prohibited among the working class, Corbel’s twin sister, Candara, had made it a mission to teach herself and a few others in the farmlands enough to be dangerous. Inspired by stories of revolution in newspaper clippings pulled from trash bins in the city center, the Dallas twins had been gathering ranchers throughout Weedpatch in the dead of night to plan for a resistance movement of their own. 

Pulling his own sister in to help with the operation, Cal and Mei worked quietly in the slums to secure a small arsenal over the next several years and pass it onto the Dallas twins, who compensated them with food and supplies from the Weedpatch farmers. The four worked diligently during the daylight hours to deter suspicion of their involvement with the growing anarchy overtaking the city. Success with small coups and protests further emboldened the mounting rebellion, and for the first time, Cal felt connected to a greater purpose than his life in Weedpatch. 

As the uprisings gathered momentum, Cal, now in his early 20s, moved into the Dallas twins’ shack under the guise of courting Candara, who was more than happy to play along and ward off marriage proposals from the locals. The three often stayed up late into the night, smoking cigarettes on the rooftop, and dreaming of life beyond Weedpatch – an adventure saved for when the city was finally secured for the people. 

However, their optimism was not to last. Once the nobility pieced together that the seemingly chaotic events that had thrown the city center into disarray were, in fact, meticulously organized events with an epicenter located out in the Weedpatch farmlands, they pushed back with a vengeance. While the Weedpatch farmers had predicted and been preparing for a final showdown pitting the working class against the nobility, what the resistance movement was met with was instead a craven slaughter. Mercenaries crept into farmsteads in the dead of night, gutting men, women, and children alike, and scattering their remains throughout the countryside as a warning to those that were left alive. Cal was knocked unconscious with the butt of a warhammer in the fray, waking up hours later in a pool of his own blood as Candara hovered over him with a look of terror on her face.

It took Cal and Candara two days to find Corbel's mangled body out in the pastures among the livestock — gutted like a farm animal, his black hair and clothing matted flat with blood and mud. After burying him under the tree outside the shack they once shared, Cal sunk into a deep depression, refusing to take off the dull red poncho that Corbel had always worn as a mark of his pride for the working class, and drowning his sorrow with hard liquor. Candara, on the other hand, charged into the city in a rage, demanding that her twin's killer “quit bein’ a gods-damned fuckin’ coward” and face her in a gunslinger's duel. When she was met with indifference from the nobility, who neither knew the names of those that were killed in the Weedpatch Massacre, nor felt themselves responsible for deaths caused by hired mercenaries, she vowed her brother's name would not be forgotten.

Supplied by the Coltrane arsenal and a small group of trusted friends, including a slightly unhinged Cal, a sharpshooter called Ebrima Juarez, and a healer-turned-amateur-necromancer by the name of Manpreet Singh, Candara mounted her own resistance movement — one that would bring her brother’s short legacy to infamy. The gang of  townsfolk-turned-bandits operated under the guise of being one individual responsible for the looting, pillaging, and rampant terror that spread like wildfire throughout the once-isolated streets of the nobility. Cal worked quickly to unlock doors, crack safes, and grab valuables, while Candara painted "CORBEL DALLAS WAS HERE" in messy, towering letters along the outside walls before lighting houses ablaze; Ebrima playing lookout from the rooftops; Manpreet waiting nearby with spells ready should a healer be required. While the nobility panicked and hunted ghosts, the four began plotting a final heist that would see them leaving on the east bound train towards Cathuria with the riches of the aristocracy in their laps and the burning city center fading over the horizon behind them like a sunset.

Yet the plan was brought to an abrupt halt when Ebrima, believing that Candara's rejections of his advances were due to her romantic interest in Cal, sold them out to the nobility for 500 gold worth of food scrip, assuring the nobles that Cal was the notorious Corbel Dallas behind the attacks on the city. Going off of this information, Cal was nabbed by the nobility's mercenaries while in the midst of cracking a bank safe. Candara was attacked with a bandana soaked in chloroform as she stood watch outside, waking up hours later to find herself tied up to a wooden support beam in the shack she had once shared with her brother and his partner. When Ebrima stood before her with a bucket of lantern oil and a match, issuing an ultimatum to marry him and leave Weedpatch or follow Cal straight into hell, she answered by spitting in his face.

Realizing Ebrima had betrayed them, Manpreet gathered what he thought were the right thieves’ tools to spring Cal from his prison cell, but was unable to get past the heavily guarded sheriff's station to smuggle them inside. Panicking, he quickly went in search of Candara, but was devastated when he instead found only the smoldering remains of a burnt down shack in the Weedpatch hillside. Rushing back to the slums to find Mei, he arrived just before dawn to witness the tail end of what would long be remembered as one of the most brutal executions in the town's history — the nobility taking pleasure in beating the man who they believed to be Corbel Dallas within an inch of his life before throwing a burlap bag over his head and hanging him from the gallows.

Cal struggled for nearly twenty minutes before his legs went limp, the sounds of sister's screams fading out as he finally stopped fighting. His body was left in the gallows as an example to the other townsfolk; a sign around his neck issuing a written warning to onlookers that none of the working class could, nor cared to, read.

It took Mei almost a full day before she was able to cut her brother's body down in the dead of night, throwing it into a cart and rushing back to Manpreet's small almond farm. Enraged, she demanded Manpreet put his necromantic studies to use and bring her brother back, despite his insistence that he’d never actually performed something as complicated as a resurrection on anything larger than small animals. But his guilt over his ineffectiveness amidst the sudden turn of events and his despair over having lost not one, but three close friends in one night, drove him to rash decision-making he was not usually prone to.

A number of things went wrong that night.

For one, Cal had been deceased nearly twenty-four hours, much longer than was ideal for necromantic magic, and his remains were in bad shape. For another, neither Cal nor Mei had connections to deities that could be called upon in such dire circumstances to assist with the process. And worst of all, Manpreet was one of the few who knew that Cal's soul mate was long dead, meaning his recalled soul could potentially fight hard against being summoned back to a mortal plane. Manpreet pushed this knowledge aside and tried to remain hopeful as he began the process of preparing the body for resurrection, removing the blood-soaked clothes from his friend's body and calling on his own deities for guidance as he willed his hands to stop shaking.

The ritual was performed, but to Manpreet and Mei's dismay, the body remained lifeless, the skin grey and cold to the touch, glassy eyes bloodshot from strangulation, the area around the neck a sickening purple. On the verge of giving up hope, Manpreet nearly pissed himself when his arm was roughly seized a few days later, as Cal sat up suddenly and demanded in a hoarse voice to know where the hell he was.

Manpreet's relief and Mei's elation were short-lived, however, as it quickly became apparent that Cal's mind was shattered. Prone to angry outbursts and fits of depression, Cal was increasingly paranoid that something was after him despite assurances that they were in a safe location. His mannerisms swung back and forth chaotically, and he'd developed a manic desire for alcohol that he complained he could no longer taste, but that kept his thoughts from racing. 

Over the course of the next several weeks, Cal's wounds grew worse, his bruises deepening as his skin grew sallow, the sickening stench of decay permeating his clothes as the already slim man grew thinner. He increasingly lost his grip on reality, becoming louder and more erratic as he flicked away rotting flesh from exposed bone, unable to do anything about it other than hide how terrified he was at what he was becoming. Despite his sister's pleas to stay hidden as Manpreet scrambled to figure out what to do, Cal stormed off into the night when he finally learned of Candara's fate, snatching Ebrima off the streets as he drunkenly walked home from a tavern in the city center.

It took a whole night of searching, but Manpreet eventually found the two out in the railyard in the early morning light, Ebrima beaten almost beyond recognition and tied up behind the back of a railroad car with a noose around his neck. The condemned man moaned quietly as Manpreet approached, Cal sitting beside him on the railroad ties smoking a cigarette, unusually quiet. 

"Got papers on you?" Cal asked Manpreet  as he approached, without looking up.

"Er, sorry?"

"Please..." Ebrima gasped.

"Hush now," Cal snapped, flicking ash at him before continuing. "You know, writin' papers. Know how to write, doncha?"

"Er," Manpreet stammered nervously, pulling a worn roll of parchment from his coat pocket and offering it over. Cal didn't take it.

"Write somethin' for me, will ya?"

Manpreet pulled a quill and small vial of ink out from a satchel, his hand shaking as he balanced the parchment on one knee and looked expectantly at his friend.

"Write ‘Corbel Dallas was here.’”

“What are you —”

“Just do it, Manpreet.”

Manpreet finished and handed it over. Cal unsheathed a dagger and stuck the note onto it, inspecting it carefully befofe plunging it into Ebrima's shoulder blade, as the man cried out in pain. The train horn whistled, signaling the engine's impending departure and temporarily drowning out Ebrima's pleas for mercy. 

Cal stood and calmly took another drag on his cigarette. Manpreet noticed the smoke escaping through gaps in the skin around Cal’s neck, but tried not to stare. 

"Cal —"

"Cal’s dead," he sighed, waving away the smoke from his collar.

"Please! Manpreet, please. I’m sorry. Just…please help me," Ebrima cried out in a raspy voice, the train slowly pulling the rope taut and cutting off his whimpers as Manpreet looked away, feeling guilty for not wanting to interfere with what was about to happen.

Cal pulled out a bottle of whiskey from under his poncho and uncorked it, raising it up to the man being dragged away. "Enjoy the pain while you can, fucker. Death's a sonofabitch," he laughed. He took a swig, then offered it to Manpreet, who shook his head, trying to figure out how Cal was even drinking given his body’s abysmal state.

"They are going to come looking for you," Manpreet said, feeling ill.

"Know what that motherfucker told me? Said Candara ain't dead," Cal replied, ignoring Manpreet’s comment and stubbing his cigarette out on the railroad track with his boot.

"What?"

"Said she escaped somehow and took off. Couldn’ find a body when he looked."

"She is alive?" Manpreet asked, incredulous. “Then why did she not come back?”

"Might be horse shit," Cal replied, stopping to spit out a piece of decayed flesh that’d loosened itself from his cheek. He stood pondering his feet silently for a moment before continuing. "Shoot straight with me, Manpreet. How long I got?"

"What do you mean?"

"Come on man, I can see my bones pokin' out through the tips of my fingers," he grumbled, pulling a glove off and surveying his mangled digits. "I haven' slept since you woke me up, I hear voices whisperin' to me if it gets too quiet. I can't eat, I ain't breathin' other than when I want to. Hell, I don' know how the fuck I'm drinkin' an' smokin' other than someone up there finally cut me a goddamn break."

Manpreet nodded sympathetically, trying to avoid making a face. "Some of this is common among…well, among the undead,” he began, hesitating when he noticed Cal flinch. “It appears as though you have suffered, and I mean this as no offense to you, my friend, but...some level of madness in the process. But there are cures for that, we just have to find someone —"

"I ain't got time for that, Manpreet, I seen the way you an' Mei look at me,” Cal snapped. “One thing to be fucked in the head, another thing to be turning into a fucking nightmare while your kin make sad faces at you." His irritation gave way quickly to laughter, startling Manpreet. Cal shook his head and pulled his bandana up over what was left of his nose as he got ahold of himself. "Sorry. 'Spose that ain't funny."

"Cal," Manpreet tried again, unsure of how to respond.

"Cal ain’t here anymore, Manpreet,” he spat, the quiet that followed irritating him too much to stay silent. “I gotta get outta here.”

"Wait, you are leaving?”

“I have to, man. I can’t stick around lookin’ like this. I don't know, maybe I'll see if Candara’s somehow out there somewhere before my body goes to shit. Corbel Dallas still got a city center full of fucking nobility to raze, only fair to her she gets in on that."

“Well, I will go with you then.”

“Like hell you will. You stay here and look after Mei, make sure she don’t do anything stupid.”

“But, what am I supposed to tell her?"

"I don’t know. Tell her Cal is dead and Corbel Dallas is off to raise hell," Cal shrugged, walking off down the railroad tracks towards the direction of Cathuria.

"You cannot just go off by yourself! What part are you not understanding?! You are a walking target as an undead right now, you are going to get yourself killed!" Manpreet called after him angrily.

"I'm already killed," Corbel laughed over his shoulder, throwing the last wink he would be able to make for a long time.


End file.
